rrohbeck writes: Electronics Weekly brings us a report on the Raspberry Pi, a computer the size of a USB stick with USB (for keyboard/mouse/network/storage), composite/HDMI video out and power connectors and a memory card slot. It runs a 700MHz ARM11 with 256MB of memory and is designed as a teaching tool, envisioned to boot Ubuntu right into interactive Python like the BASIC computers that got many of us hooked on programming.There is a lot of interest from developing countries and chances are that there will be a buy one, give one program.

"There is an energy barrier at the start of the learning curve," said Upton. With the Spectrum or the BBC micro, even if you only wanted it to run a game, you turned it on and it immediately said 'BASIC' and you could write>10 print "Hello world">20 goto 10.A lot of us got sucked in by that and became programmers."